Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

‘No,’ said Pahl, shaking his head, ‘unfortunately, the major’s got it wrong. I’ll be buzzing off back to Germany with my toe, and you, dear chap, had better get some help with this even if you have to go to the moon for it. We’ll soon prise you out of a court martial.’

Bertin felt suddenly ashamed of the initial caution that had made him want to keep quiet. He needed to be open with those who trusted him and discuss with them how best to proceed. He was ready for the fight now and armed against the potential vicissitudes to come. That was why he just laughed when a nurse came up to Pahl’s bed, asked rather curtly which of the two of them was Bertin and said he’d been expected him for some time in room 19.

The two men left behind watched his retreating back and thinning hair. ‘We did him an injustice that time back in Romagne, Karl,’ said Pahl. But Karl Lebehde observed impassively that it was better to do someone an injustice than to suffer one and that he hadn’t noticed anything.

Judge Advocate Posnanski took a while to say goodbye to Kroysing and was almost paternal in his warmth. The room mates listened with amusement to the fat man talking but thought that what he said made sense. For Lieutenant Kroysing didn’t want to accept that his plan to send the sappers a replacement in the form of Bertin simply wasn’t going to work. Posnanski spoke only of how important Bertin was as the only witness in the future trail of retired civil servant Niggl from Weilheim in Upper Bavaria. Kroysing could not deny the logic of his analysis, though he growled in reluctance: ‘You want me to start fighting private battles like everyone else in this war.’ This ‘you’ encompassed Lieutenants Flachsbauer and Mettner, who supported the judge advocate’s plans. ‘The man is capable of commanding a company, and you want me to put him in a display cabinet.’

The man was born for the court martial, Lieutenant Flachsbauer cried in reply. And Lieutenant Mettner asked sarcastically if he’d ever thought of letting him choose for himself.

‘Choose?’ said Kroysing haughtily, though he was laughing. ‘Oh, that’d be great.’

‘You tyrant,’ teased Lieutenant Flachsbauer.

‘Slave driver,’ added Lieutenant Mettner, who was often genuinely annoyed by Kroysing’s tyrannical and commanding manner. And in order to irritate him he told the story of a minor and not particularly relevant incident he’d seen a few weeks before he was wounded. It demonstrated a lack of backbone which showed the average officer clearly represented the average German, as Mettner had come to know him. As a liaison officer with Group West he had passed on a complaint made to him by an officer who had poured his heart out to him during a inspection in a neighbouring sector. The officer had said that because of the relay stations it was impossible to get the high ups to understand that each of his companies in the front line (‘in the shit,’ as he put it) had a combat strength of barely 40 rifles at its disposal and not over 110 as was continually reported. ‘And then the high ups wonder when we take a pasting. Sick and transferred men are always counted in too.’

Mettner promised to deal with it. But when one of the inspectors from the Lychow Group appeared to check it out, the officer denied it all for fear of making himself unpopular with the regiment, and Lieutenant Mettner was left in the lurch. ‘And he did only have 40 rifles when the French suddenly attacked. And you want to throw your unsuspecting friend in among that lot where he’ll always be putting their backs up? Well, I’d sooner not have you for a brother.’

Kroysing started up, upset by the word ‘brother’, but controlled himself: he had always put the common good above his own interests, he grumbled. Was that a problem?

‘But you can see that in this case circumstances require a different response,’ said Posnanksi soothingly. ‘So let me have Bertin or rather help me to get him, for—’ But the three men in the room explained they’d already heard the whole story from the jinxed man himself. ‘So much the better,’ twinkled Posnanski, ‘then you can be my representatives.’ And he said that he had found a champion for Bertin in Sister Kläre, who was going to telephone a high-ranking personage and ask him to intervene. ‘Keep at her. Don’t harangue her but don’t let it go either. If she gets annoyed, don’t push it. Maybe you can bring it up in 12 hours or so, eh? All she promised me was to think about it. You look as though you won’t leave her in peace until she gets on that phone, dear chap.’

Kroysing flushed and said he would do what he could, just as Bertin walked in eager to hear from Posnanksi if his cause was lost. They laughed at him, mocking his downbeat attitude. Speaking in the tone of a regimental commander, Kroysing announced that Bertin was to be transferred to the court martial because of lack of bottle. Posnanski assured him that effective steps in that direction had already been taken. When Posnanski finally set off, he left behind a happy party and Bertin was much reassured. Posnanski shook Bertin’s hand warmly and said he was counting on him and was only going on ahead in order to spend his leave in Berlin.

‘Have a good time, then,’ said Kroysing, ‘and say hello to the old place for me.’

‘I will,’ said Posnanski. ‘Any particular part?’

‘The part between the Technical University and Wittenbergplatz,’ said Kroysing. ‘Where there are always so many girls’ legs on view.’

‘Right, so Tauentzienstraße and the Kurfürstendamm,’ said Posnanksi, pretending to make a note on the palm of his hand.

‘Stop,’ cried Bertin. ‘Where are the files?’

‘You’ll make an excellent clerk, my legal friend,’ said Posnanski gravely. ‘I’ll leave them with my representative.’ And then he finally pushed off, accompanied to his car by Bertin.

When he returned, Kroysing asked him in passing if frog face had told him anything important. No, replied Bertin innocently, he’d just told him a bit about the people in the staff with whom he might come into contact. Kroysing seemed happy with this reply. None of the four initiates had let on to Bertin whom the judge advocate meant by his representative. Posnanki had worked on the assumption that people usually come over best when they act naturally. However, the three officers, who had all been rather taken aback by Posnanski’s disclosure, kept the information from Bertin out of a curious kind of esprit de corps . They were from the hospital, and so was Sister Kläre. Bertin wasn’t. The person to be telephoned was a hospital secret. Outsiders didn’t need to know about it. But above all, they liked the idea of at least sharing a secret with this woman, if nothing else. Until that day, the idea that she’d had something with the crown prince had just been talk. Now it seemed it was real, and each of the three young men envied the general. For some time now, none of them had seen Sister Kläre as a nurse. They all felt themselves to be enveloped by her sparkling charm. For in a long war, however manly a soldier’s behaviour may be, he falls back into childhood in most important respects. He no longer eats with a knife and fork, but instead spoons gruel into his mouth. He no longer goes to the toilet on his own, but sits on a public latrine like a child in a nursery. He suppresses his own will to an extraordinary degree, obeying blindly and unconditionally, as a small child obeys adults whom it trusts or who force it to comply. His feelings of love and hate, of liking and aversion, are directed at his superiors, who replace father and mother, and at his comrades who represent siblings. In this seamlessly childish existence, where destruction plays as big a part as it does in the nursery, there is no room for relationships between men and women except in the imagination. Furthermore, soldiers like children are spared the struggle for their daily bread and do not have to deal with the relationship between earnings and productive work, with the toil, labour and rewards that are such an integral part of adult life. And so the erotic impulse is much stronger in the creative environment of peace than in the destructive one of war, where it can easily be diverted to the same sex, completing the analogy with childhood. But after the shock and physical agony of the first weeks in hospital, there is a rebirth, a sort of maturing such as follows the torture of puberty in primitive communities, and the young men start to look around themselves with new eyes, discover that there are women and are thrown into turmoil. But towards Bertin, who was denied the blessings of this rebirth, they were unconsciously patronising, like 15-year-olds to a nine-year-old, treating him like a lower being, harmless and inadequate. What did he know of adult secrets?